ABSTRACT
Recent panics have centered on the use of the power of Web 2.0 to trick voters, using fake news and/or targeted propaganda (not that the differences between the two are always clear). Frightening reports, as scare-mongering as that of Vlad the Impaler, have come to light, e.g. about the city in Macedonia with a thriving fake news industry or the high-tech mass hypnosis supposedly wrought by Cambridge Analytica. These stories, however, presuppose a capacity to influence behaviour which the media has never been proven to possess. Here once again the internet gets too much credit, while the complexities of human behaviour go largely unconsidered. The study of the specific case of conspiracy theories and where they come from, arising out of a more general interrogation of how profoundly their biases affect how people process information, paints recent events in a very different light. Take Pizzagate, as an intrinsically online example both of fake news and conspiracy theory. It displays striking similarities to the 12th century fake news story and conspiracy theory of the Blood Libel, demonstrating both the general unavoidability of these problems. More specifically, note how, never mind the seductions of technicism, persistent fake news has always been.
